Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
According to many authors, there is no reason to believe that inner planets never had satellites in the past. Indeed, Alfvén and Arrhenius (1972), Burns (1973), Ward and Reid (1973), etc, explain their disappearance using essentially tidal effects which cause secular variations in the semimajor axes. Here, taking into account only gravitational forces, we show that the extinction or the non existence of Earth’s satellites could also be related to some strong instabilities which increase the eccentricities e to prohibitive values.